The Creator, Womanhood, and 21st Century America
God made women and womanhood.
This is a fundamental truth that has to be acknowledged before we can get anywhere productive in helping our sisters to be what is best. God designed womanhood. He took a rib from Adam’s side and crafted the first helper for the first man. And He has made every woman since. God created their purpose, their hearts, their calling.
Now, our secular time and place recoils at much of what is true and God-breathed about women and womanhood:
That childbearing is a normative good for women:
“For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.” (1 Timothy 2:13-15)
That it is good for husbands to spiritually lead and teach their wives:
“For God is not a God of confusion but of peace. As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says. If there is anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.” (1 Corinthians 14:33-35)
That a woman’s conduct is a truer testament to her beauty (or ugliness) than her physical appearance:
“Likewise, wives, be subject to your own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word, they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives, when they see your respectful and pure conduct. Do not let your adorning be external—the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear— but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious.” (1 Peter 3:1-4)
That the work of an older woman in training younger women to be Godly is important:
“Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.”
Our mainstream culture finds some or all of these truths abhorrent. But our culture is confused.
2023 America is misguided on what women are just as many cultures throughout our stumbling common human history have been. Confusion always happens when a culture sets out on its own to redefine something God made. But reality is stubborn, and every wounded or lost heart that has suffered at the hands of a disjointed, out-of-proportion contention of what women should be is suffering precisely because how and why women were made cannot be changed. Trying to change how God made the word or how He continues to make humans is like trying to turn Mount Everest into a parking lot by hitting it with a plastic spoon.
Whether power suits or airbrushed supermodels or flimsy, shallow, virtueless plastic cheerleaders, every mischaracterization of the ideal woman leaves carnage behind it. There are countless kids and women and men and families and communities who bear the marks of trying to pretend the truths above aren’t truths. But God designed us, men and women. Hemade the first pair, and He authored our calling and our task as His capstone of creation. We will never be able to alter what men or women are made to be. Nor should we want to.
The Creator knows what He made and why.
Let us trust Him rather than the maelstrom of misguided projections glittering away on our SmartPhones and TVs.
After all, not all that glitters is gold.